Aifoon experiments with sound and silence. Participants of this workshop are invited to express their fascination for a certain environment by means of sound. Using different types of microphones, sounds are recorded and subsequently processed in an artistic live composition.

Talking Walking will bring 50 (English speaking) voices of walking artists and activists to complement the Sideways walking festival. 2012 marks the fifth anniversary of the Talking Walking podcast project, which begun on a Walking and Art residency at the Banff Centre of Arts in Canada in September 2007. Surrounded by 20 plus artists, performers and writers, Andrew wanted to find out how walking influenced their practice. He wanted to find a way in which he could share their walking insights and experience, and began publishing the interviews as podcasts. So began Talking Walking, which has carried on far beyond the duration of the residency, and has broadened to include amongst those Andrew has interviewed, professionals working in the world of walking.

With his 'urban free-climbing' performance, Antony Schrag takes participants along new pathways, passages and gangways. Anthony invites participants to find new paths around the city, and new ways to see the paths that might not have been visible to them, as they've been thinking with their feet, instead of their whole body.

During one week, Boris Nieslony walks with a table on his back. Turned vertically, this object of sociability and homeliness is set in motion and turns into a sculptural element. During his performances, Boris raises questions about movement, endurance, affect and concentration.

PERFORMANCE, FIELD & ONLINE BROADCASTING Participants of the Sideways expedition from 18.08 to 2.09Interventions in Herzele (25-26.08) and Brussels (1-2.09)

A Belgian Transect is a collaborative performance project by Bram Thomas Arnold & Eleanor Wynne Davis that will take place along the route of Sideways 2012 between the city of Menen and the capital Brussels. Audiences are invited to witness some of these performances, on the spot, or in real time via Field Broadcasts, directly to their computer or laptop.

The project is developed as a book addressing transience and mobility as central themes, and aims to act as a mobile object for journeying: the book is both a journey in writing, as well as a device for conditioning the steps of the reader. The work functions as a writing-walking, developing reflections and meditations on the conditions of the step. Part-fiction and part-essay, Handbook for the Itinerant notates the everyday as a search for affiliation across multiple geographies (physical,relational, imaginary and virtual). Aspects such as the poetics of walking (drift and dreaming), the politics of mobility (place and displacement; gentrification), passing through (tourism, on the road), and the challenges of global migration(itinerant work and the refugee) are reflected upon so as to open up a critical and creative territory on what it means to go from here to there. Mobility is thus underscored as bringing together the poetics of walking, of transiting and meandering,with that of the global refugee and the itinerant worker.

'Ecological dispersals' relates to the migration of plants and organisms that reposition themselves in a new context, thus redefining a habitat from one of neglect to one of diversity. In this respect, 'context' is re-scribed as a social environment - in constant flux, agitated by human presence and interaction with the 'other' – whether turning the page of a sketchbook, bending close to the ground searching for microscopic patterns or engaged with people mediated through conversations. Christine Mackey takes this notion of migratory diversity in botany as the subject of her project during the Sideways journey. Applying an old tradition – 'stooped labour' in a contemporary context - she has devised a series of creative activities – collecting/digging/drawing/ recording/talking/mapping to generate new material, whereby the focus is less on textual descriptions of biological phenomenon and more about getting dirty and active in the field. These observational processes recombined with other mobile mediums will manifest as a temporary installation combining a range of mediums, thus enriching our experience of both the materiality of the route and its physical manifestation.

In July 2009 Clemens Wilhelm started out on foot to walk from Munich to the Venice Biennial. The path of more than 600 km took him across the alps in one month, from the Southern German lowlands across the high mountain ranges of the Alps and down to the Adriatic sea. Along the way he took a photograph of the road ahead every 15 minutes. These pictures blend into a slideshow video. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said in an interview that if one wanted to become an artist, one should not spend years in art school but take a long walk alone with a camera. As his graduation project, Clemens Wilhelm undertook this long walk.

During Sideways, artist duo Cristian Borș & Marius Rițiu will present their free to use concept 'Bleach Gallery', which is a low-cost do-it-yourself art gallery.

Once upon a time Cristian Borș & Marius Rițiu came to the West and learned to play pétanque. Arriving in Antwerp in 2010, the Romanian artist duo famed their way in the art world in a quite unusual way. Missing the deadline for an exhibition at Middelheim park, they tagged every poster of the exhibition to be found around the city of Antwerp with their stickers and installed their work -the artists on bicycles- in front of the park, entitled: Behind the fence (uninvited artists). Indeed, Borș & Rițiu conspired to a plan to race their way to fame and kicked off with the work How To Become Famous in One Month, shown at Gallery Marion de Cannière. Fruitfully, the art world is following the adventures of this humourful artist duo and in October 2011, they received the Cutlog Prize from ARTE.

Daniël Dewaele, whose work is part of the SMAK (Ghent) and M HKA (Antwerp) collections, is considered as a pioneer of Belgian conceptual art. For over forty years, Daniël deciphers contemporary society in installations, sculptures, videos, photographs and performances. He meticulously collects, classifies and presents seemingly identical objects, facts and spaces, in an effort to underline a common identity.

Photographer Daniel Djamo focalizes on the road as a space of encounters, a place where rumours circulate and legends originate. During Sideways Festival, Daniel tries to grasp this narrational power of the road using both film and video.

The Soundstorming walkshop is an investigation into the spatial and acoustic affordances of public space and found places. Similar to the process of brainstorming, the pretext of Soundstorming is to provide a context in which participants explore different listening modes and develop site specific interventions. The walkshop is six days in length and it is designed as a four days walk followed by a debriefing session and final presentation to the audience of the festival.

FOOD MOVEMENT COLLECTIVE - Participant of the Sideways expedition from 17.08 to 17.09

Motivated by a collective longing for alternative ways and a larger autonomy when providing in our daily bread, food collective De Beek came into being. De Beek prepares the meals for the artists and crew of the Sideways expedition. For this, they collaborate with local farmers, self-harvest initiatives and hobby-gardeners.

The Dutch artists Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum live in Amsterdam, but develop work with new media in many parts of the world. Through their interactive projects, they introduce the public to a myriad of fleeting phenomena, such as the movement of people and animals in urban or rural areas.

Filip Van Dingenen retraces the cano trip Robert Louis Stevenson described in his travelogue 'An Inland Voyage' (1878). The experience along the waterway between Antwerp and Brussels, the stories of people met and found souvenirs are presented in a multimedia installation during the festival weekend in Turnhout.

Café Hallo is a rudimentary, mobile meeting space. Café Hallo is an event where people, friends, the audience and passers-by meet, linger around, stay and go. There are no opening hours, only waves of activity. There will be fire, sounds, some chairs, something to drink. A Thousand Plateaus of possibilities.

'The Way' takes the public along a remarkable, unpaved backroad next to the Brussels ring road. The mesmerizing atmosphere of the area unfolds as a musical score shared by all through earphones. Their second performance 'Schoen Vol Moed' (Courage-Filled Shoes) celebrates a final moment of refueling on a roundabout, conceived as a liminal zone to a post-car society.

Did you ever dig a big hole, build a hut or set fire to something when you were a kid? Do you remember your first cigarette as a teenager? Did you ever use drugs? Ever had sex somewhere outside? Did you ever miss the last train or bus, and had no place to go to? Did you ever reach the moment when you just had to pee and there was no toilet somewhere near? What kind of place did you look for? It must have been a place without 'value', a space of no economic use. It could have been a wasteland, the bushes near the side of the road, the space under a bridge, an abandoned building. Did you notice that people before you also used that space? That the way leading to it had already been made, that it was actually obvious?

During the Sideways festival, Jeremy Wood creates a unique GPS drawing and conduct discussion sessions in a series of workshops. Participants will be confronted with issues of accessibility in totalitarian topography and experience the physical intricacies of drawing with GPS in public spaces.

During the first week of Sideways festival, storytellers Joe Baele and Hugh Lupton travel by horse and an authentic English gipsy wagon from Menen to Herzele. Along the way, looking for 'ghosts' roaming the land, they perform local stories.

Lara Dhondt visually investigates the nomadic aspects of urban life and builds temporary sculptures along the Sideways trajectory. Everybody can trace these constructions by using the instructions that will appear on the Sideways website.

Palimpfest is a research project focusing on the vertical layers (time) and horizontal dynamics (networks) of a place. The artist collective unravels the biography of the place to reconstruct it by means of a physical intervention in the landscape.

Myers and Heddon will create a Walking Library that will accompany the festival over its four week duration. The library, carried on foot, will contain books that people feel should be taken on a walk. Participants in the festival are encouraged to bring a book to deposit in the library. Readings will be selected and shared daily, and a new book of writing about walking, created by participants, will be added to the library at the end of the festival.

During a two-day workshop in the urban environment of Brussels, Annemie Maes and Nathalie Hunter take the participants hunting for plants qualified for consumption. These urban edibles are gathered, named and archived in a herbarium.

Orquestina de Pigmeos develops an ambulatory, site-specific and interactive performance, that will take place along a route where the walker will be invited to experience the landscape from different perspectives, from the simple contemplation to a total active participation, counting with the collaboration of different musicians, performers and local people. This performance will link the urban center of Zutendaal to the agriculture area in the outskirts, through Lieteberg.

DonkeyXote is a combination of an analogue Donkey and mobile digital tools. Equipped with digital hardware, the traditional pack animal becomes the living interface between the real and virtual world. A 'low-impact', friendly and high-tech donkey and its keeper will travel through the country as a digital, mobile and web-live platform in order to capture and map a contemporary image of the region, contributing to its audiovisual heritage in a unique way. Peter Ankh's DonkeyXote project will be the digital platform and social network of the Sideways journey: a nomadic, 'low impact' hub under the Creative Commons licence. The donkey will function as a living and walking browser that will produce information, geo-tagging knowledge, mapping route, collecting things, asking questions, searching for answers and share this content, bringing the Sideways journey online 'in real time'. The project aims to be a cocktail of ethical, tactical, educational and psychogeographical meaning; while walking at human speed new methods are explored to map the complex assemblages of humans, plants, animals, artifacts, technologies and physical landscape features.

By attaching canvasses to his shoes while walking the Sideways trajectory, the Belgian painter Reg Carremans records the landscape and its material configuration. At the end of the journey, the canvasses are assembled into a final installation.

Playing on the Belgian tradition of the Ruiltocht ("trade-trip"), Susanne and Kaspar undertake a strategy for exchange (both material and immaterial) that accompanies the Sideways journey. Alongside this trade 'caravan', they will engage with Sideways festival as a form of transient non-residency, investigating the notion of compression.

PORTABLE ARCHITECTURES AND PROVOCATIONS + MANIFESTO PERFORMANCES Participants of the Sideways expedition from 9.09 to 16.09Interventions in Zutdendaal (15-16.09)

For Sideways, Wrights & Sites takes inspiration from ramblers, nomads, refugees and DIY enthusiasts. To recognise the walker as a maker or a transformer of the lived environment. To augment this transformational potential, by assisting the walker in framing and interacting with the landscape, as well as feeding into new ideas around planning and building.

Peace Pilgrimage is a month long prayer for peace in the world, peace within our environment and among individuals, and - very important - inner peace. On the physical plane it will manifest in installation spaces created from one thousand origami cranes and shamanic healing practices of the five elements held in each location. After the rituals the cranes will be left exposed to the elements, slowly dissolving as the prayers are blown by the wind to spread good will and loving kindness into the surrounding space. Please, feel free to join the peace walk and meditation sessions (bring your own yoga mat/seat cushion).